Business Overview:
The client is a US based, venture-backed FinTech SaaS startup. Their clientele majorly includes digital-first accounting firms, finance consultants and freelancers across North America, the UK, Southeast Asia, and Australia. Their core offering is a cloud-based financial platform that simplifies compliance, invoicing and multi-currency operations.
They operate on a hybrid GTM model: self-serve signups and onboarding via HubSpot for smaller accounts, and sales-assisted upgrades through Salesforce for high-usage trials. QuickBooks powers their invoicing and financial workflows. Their growth demanded real-time alignment across marketing, sales, and billing to scale efficiently and compliantly.
Reason For Collaboration:
The client needed a lasting and reliable integrated solution as their deal volume and customer base began expanding across North America and Southeast Asia. While they were already using Salesforce, HubSpot, and QuickBooks; none of these were connected. It led to lead leakage, quoting delays, and missed billing timelines. Manual handoffs between Sales, Marketing, and Finance were leading to errors, duplicated work, and customer frustration.
As a certified Salesforce Integration partner, we designed a real-time, API-led architecture that can: automate handoffs, maintain financial accuracy, and scale with their GTM complexity. What they needed was more than API connectivity and our approach served this right to them in the form of a Salesforce-centered integration strategy.
Challenges:
1. Disconnected Lead Handoff from HubSpot to Salesforce
Marketing teams were managing all pre-sales interactions inside HubSpot including content downloads, onboarding emails and product trial behavior. But once users hit “hand-raiser” thresholds or requested demos, that data didn’t consistently transfer to Salesforce. Reps had no visibility into the lead’s journey, and that’s why they often reached out too late or with poor context and frequently missed the ideal engagement time.
These disconnects impacted on the trust between Marketing and Sales, inflated MQL-to-SQL timelines, and led to lost high-intent leads.
2. Fragmented Customer View Across Systems Hampered Collaboration
The sales team used Salesforce to track opportunities, Finance owned billing in QuickBooks and Marketing was stuck with HubSpot. But each in isolation. There was no single source of truth of customer data across teams. When a rep checked an account, they couldn’t see the subscription tier, payment status, or invoice history. Finance couldn’t trace how discounts were approved or who closed a deal. CSMs lacked insight into expansion activity. As volume scaled, these blind spots created costly rework, duplications, and internal tension.
3. Unstructured Quote-to-Cash Process
Sales often customized payment terms, offering onboarding fee waivers, split billing or region specific invoicing. These terms were negotiated over calls, noted in Slack threads and forwarded to finance manually and informally. There were no guardrails, audit trails, or consistent workflows. As a result, invoices were delayed, inaccurately issued, or completely missed. Revenue recognition wasn’t marked on time, CFO’s visibility to accounts was limited, and Finance teams frequently found themselves in cleanup mode.
4. No Visibility to Subscription Modifications For Customer-Facing Teams
Post-sales, customers frequently upgraded, downgraded or paused their plans. These changes were reflected in QuickBooks but never synced back in Salesforce. CSMs and sales reps worked with outdated MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) values, unaware about churn-risk behavior and missed renewal touchpoints. Managers were hesitant to rely on the Salesforce pipeline to forecast NRR (Net Revenue Retention) accurately, creating a challenge for investor reporting.
Leadership couldn’t rely on the Salesforce pipeline to forecast NRR accurately—posing a challenge for investor reporting.
5. Disjointed Revenue and Performance Reporting
Each department pulled its own version of revenue data. Marketing couldn’t connect CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) to LTV (Customer Lifetime Value). Sales couldn’t track expansion velocity. Finance teams lacked forecasting input beyond historical billing. The executive team received static reports that were days or weeks old, making performance reviews reactive, not strategic.
Solutions:
To streamline the growing deal volume and compliance complexity, our Salesforce integrators performed data mapping and delivered a scalable strategy that connected Salesforce, HubSpot, and QuickBooks into a single operational flow.
The solution focused on improving lead flow, quote accuracy, and subscription visibility. It was backed by customized automations, validation rules, and guided workflows for each team.
1. Integrated HubSpot & Salesforce For Real-Time Sync
To solve the lead flow breakdown, we built a real-time sync between HubSpot and Salesforce using MuleSoft, enhanced with custom lifecycle mapping logic.
- Qualified leads enriched with trial usage signals and UTM parameters flowed into Salesforce in real time. Each record included lifecycle stage, engagement score, product interest, and timestamped activity logs.
- We also designed a Flow-based lead assignment engine that auto-routed leads based on tier, trial behavior, and geography. It helped SDRs to engage at the right moment, with full context.
- Apex-based deduplication prevented creation of redundant records, reducing lead clutter and misrouted outreach.
Our team ran enablement sessions showing reps how to interpret pre-sales behavior inside Salesforce and embedded help tooltips in Lightning pages to decode UTM values and lifecycle logic.
2. Unified Customer View with Real-Time Salesforce-QuickBooks Data Sync
Our Integration architect designed a centralized account structure in Salesforce that pulled in QuickBooks billing and subscription data using API-based MuleSoft flows.
- Then, we extended the Account object with custom fields and child objects to store: Payment status, Subscription start/end dates, Tier type and billing frequency and Last invoice value and due date.
- These details were made visible in a custom Lightning web component integrated into the Sales Console.
- Customer Success Managers could see financial context during quarterly business reviews; reps could validate account health before pitching upsells.
To ensure usability, we trained revenue and finance teams together on how to interpret and act on financial signals inside Salesforce. This eliminated the guesswork or Slack threads. Teams finally shared a single version of truth.
3. Automated Quote-to-Cash Workflow
The developers replaced the spreadsheet-based quoting process with Flow-based quote generation in Salesforce. It featured dropdown billing terms, discount controls, and embedded compliance validations.
Whenever a quote involved non-standard terms (like multi-currency or onboarding fee waivers), Salesforce Flow Orchestrator triggered an approval from finance leaders.
- Once approved, the deal triggered a QuickBooks invoice via API, with matched terms and timestamps recorded on the Opportunity record.
The Salesforce Integration team delivered hands-on quote-building walkthroughs for sales and a simplified finance approval queue dashboard. This streamlined the collaboration without requiring Finance to micromanage.
4. Live Subscription Sync from QuickBooks into Salesforce Using Platform Events + Apex Handlers
To surface ongoing subscription changes (expansions, downgrades, pauses), our experts engineered a QuickBooks-to-Salesforce sync using platform events.
- These events triggered Apex handlers that updated subscription metadata across Account, Opportunity, and Contract objects in real time.
- We created a “Subscription Timeline” Lightning component showing CSMs the complete billing history, churn risk indicators (e.g., plan downgrades), and expansion signals.
- Alerts for risky plan changes were also sent to the account owner via Slack.
By embedding training into the tool itself, through contextual alerts and glossary modals, reps could engage accounts more strategically and at the right time.
5. Revenue Performance Dashboard Framework Built Directly Inside Salesforce
We developed a custom reporting architecture in Salesforce that unified: HubSpot UTM and CAC data, Opportunity & conversion metrics and QuickBooks revenue & payment data
- Using native Reports & Dashboards, leadership could track CAC vs. LTV by segment, churn rate by billing friction, and conversion velocity by acquisition channel, all in one place.
We held a joint dashboard training for RevOps, Marketing, and Finance, framing usage around quarterly planning, not just retrospective analysis.
Benefits:
- Seamless lead-to-invoice journey across HubSpot, Salesforce, and QuickBooks, eliminating manual handoffs.
- Centralized customer financial data enabled Sales, CS, and Finance to act on a single source of truth.
- Automated quote approvals and invoice sync reduced compliance risk without slowing down velocity.
- Real-time subscription visibility empowered teams to proactively reduce churn and drive expansion.
